Motorola's Position for W3C Workshop on
Web Applications and Compound Documents
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Both subjects are of interest to Motorola. They are raising more
questions than answers as interoperability is the major benefit of Web
applications and compound documents. Ensuring it, is an essential task
and we see this worshop as an interesting initiative.
Concerning the Web Applications, Motorola is not developing
applications, however, we are interested in knowing what the hosting
environment will have to provide (in particular, the availability of
reusable UI controls). Our discussions with operators suggest that such
applications (at least scripted documents) are requested by content
providers, and we intend to be open to their needs.
Regarding the compound documents, it is difficult to provide
interoperability for such content (I actually don't know of any
conformance test suite dealing with compound documents). One of the
example is the MMS message which contains SMIL, SVG and XHTML in a
simple fashion (SVG and XHTML displayed in their respective viewports).
This is a case where interoperability requires work from the different
companies involved. The use of subsets of course makes the task even
more complex. Some issue such as linking are not resolved: how should
the events behave and be propagated to the different documents for
example? In fact, using different viewers that can display compound
documents can show important discrepancy. It is not difficult to imagine
that when even well defined XML languages such as SMIL and SVG still
display differently depending on the player (and they pass the
conformance test suite!).
Partial update of the content, especially in compound document may
become a feature that content creator may want to use, especially in
the context of wireless communication. This is also an interesting
feature for web applications: how could an application download its UI
and then reuse it by just updating its content.
An effort that the W3C could tackle is the creation of such a test suite
that would ensure that players are compliant and can deterministically
display compound documents.
Best regards,
Christophe Gillette
Motorola Inc.